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The "Chinafication" of America

By Scott Rohter, June 2013

“We don’t make flatware. We don’t make tableware. We don’t even manufacture our own underwear anymore! How can this kind of free trade actually be good for our country?”


From Brazil to the U.S.A., China is definitely on the move. And it is moving very quickly and quantitatively to increase its presence in America. Their increasing footprint comes after China has already reduced one of America's stalwart allies in Asia into a mere industrial colony to be used for raw materials to fuel its staggering industrial and manufacturing growth. That country is Australia. The coal, steel, and other natural resources that Australia mines from the ground are being loaded on board container ships and transported to its bigger Asian neighbor to the north who has an even bigger appetite for economic success. Until recently that economic success was still measured in American dollars... But not anymore. China and Australia have agreed to stop paying each other in dollars... either American or Australian. From now on they will pay for the goods and services that they sell to each other in the yuan. That is the slang word for the official Chinese currency, which is the Jin-Min-piao.


In Brazil, China has increased its trade twenty-fold in the last decade, and now China wants to increase its footprint, and its dominance right here in North America too. So let’s take a look back a few years to see how this actually happened. In 1999 under President James Earl Carter, the United States relinquished control of the Panama Canal Zone. Our lease in perpetuity to the Panama Canal was handed over to the Panamanians, and we allowed the control of the Canal Zone to revert back to Panama .. The Panamanians wasted no time in auctioning off the rights to operate the Canal for the next twenty five years to a Chinese company based in Hong Kong that is owned by billionaire investor Li Ka Shing, the richest man in Asia. He was happy to snap it up. That came as a very big surprise to most Americans, since we actually built the Panama Canal at a great cost in terms of lives lost and money spent. Nevertheless President President Jimmy Carter who is a real "Dummycrat" if there ever was one was happy to preside over this passing of an era in American foreign policy.


So now a Chinese company named Hutchinson Whampoa Ltd is the principal owner of the lease to operate the ports on both ends of the Canal Zone thus “controlling” the access both to and from it. There are plans in the works to deepen and expand the present day Canal to accommodate even bigger ships. Whether the Chinese will actually get involved in this expansion remains to be seen. There is some talk that they would prefer to build an alternative canal in Nicaragua, and they probably have the money to do it. But the purchase of the 25 year lease in 1999 to ports on both sides of the Panama Canal Zone marked the actual beginning of the Chinese economic incursion into our hemisphere…


China has been hoping to buy major infrastructure in the United States for a long time. They are a major tenant, and they lease a major portion of the Port of Long Beach in southern California. They have purchased commercial banks, major brand name institutions, and other strategic resources within the United States. These include economic resources as well as natural resources. For instance in 2012 they opened their fourth branch of the Bank of China in the United States to add to their two other branches located in New York, and one branch located in Los Angeles. Another Chinese owned bank, the Agricultural Bank of China opened its first office in New York City in 2012. Three Chinese banking and investment companies combined to purchase an 80% interest in the New York-based Bank of East Asia. These three companies are the Industrial and Commerce Bank of China, the China Investment Corporation, and Huijin Investment Company. All of these things occurred under the watchful eye of Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.


China also purchased the Hummer division of General Motors in 2009. One deal that they tried to cut that did not make it through the scrutiny of the Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIS) was their attempted purchase of UNOCAL of California, an oil company that owns many gasoline stations. Now they are in the process of trying to acquire their very first major American Food producer in the United States, Smithfield Foods Inc. for just under five billion dollars and then taking that company private. Smithfield Foods is the world’s #1 producer of pork and pork products with over one million sow hogs. One of their most popular brand names is the Armour brand. This buyout will probably have to win the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment too.


Finally there is a little known story that is developing right now in Coos Bay, Oregon right here in my own home State. A liquefied Natural Gas export terminal is being planned for this sleepy Oregon coastal town, and a project is on the drawing boards to purchase the right of way to build a natural gas pipeline across the Coastal Mountain Range to the tiny Southeastern Oregon town of Malin near the California border. There it will connect with existing natural gas pipelines which are owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric, Tuscarora Gas, and Gas Transmission Northwest that carry natural gas south to California. It will also connect with the main Ruby Pipeline which brings the natural gas down here from the oil and gas fields of Wyoming. The Jordan Cove Energy project is expected to deliver liquefied natural gas to the Port of Coos Bay along the Oregon Coast where it will be refrigerated and stored, prior to being transported overseas to consumers in China, Japan, India, and North Korea. The plan is to build the pipeline and export the natural gas overseas. This is the idea of the principal owner of this project which is a Canadian company named Veresen Inc. based in Calgary, Alberta. They have absolutely no loyalty to the United States of America. They are a foreign owned company.


This pipeline would be three feet in diameter and 234 miles long. It would stretch all the way from Coos Bay on the Oregon coast, southeast across the mountains to little Malin, Oregon in Klamath County. It would cross the Interstate 5 transportation corridor just north of Myrtle Creek, which is about ten miles south of Roseburg, and from there it would head southeast to the town of Shady Cove, Oregon on Highway 62. It would also cross five different rivers: the Coos, the Coquille, the Rogue, the Umpqua, and the Klamath in an effort to connect the natural gas fields of Wyoming with the Port of Coos Bay on the Central Oregon Coast. Currently the Jordan Cove Energy project and its pipeline enjoy considerable public support in the various counties that the pipeline crosses because of the short term construction jobs that it would create. But the key words here are short term construction jobs. There will not be any long term gains in the un-employment rate as a result of this project. When all of the digging is done, all of the jobs will be lost.


The Jordan Cove Energy project would sell American natural gas to Asian countries… notably Japan, North Korea, India, and China. After admitting that we have been in an ongoing energy crises for most of the past twenty years, and that we have been at the mercy of foreign oil cartels like OPEC who have set artificially high prices on their energy exports, so that we are now paying as much as 4 dollars a gallon for gasoline, are we now going to sell own newly discovered and much needed energy supplies to Japan and China? Is this nuts or what?


Veresen Inc. of Canada is planning on selling so much American natural gas to Asian customers overseas that it would supply the entire State of Oregon with all of its energy needs for well into the foreseeable future… Actually it could supply four million American households with all of their power. This is nothing to be taken lightly, or taken for granted. Furthermore this LNG plant which is proposed for Coos Bay with its trans Coastal Mountain pipeline comes on the heels of another very controversial project to transport American coal reserves from Montana via the trainload full through the Columbia River Gorge to ports on the Columbia River for shipment to China.


This is what I consider to be the economic colonization of America by China … In other words China is using the United States as a supplier of raw materials in much the same way that the nations of Europe once used other countries around the world for their natural resources during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Today this is exactly what China is using Australia for, and Africa, Latin America, and the rest of the countries of Southeast Asia. They are using them as sources for raw materials to fuel their economic expansion. And now that is precisely what China is intending to do in the United States too.


Corroborating Source Material
http://www.npr.org/2013/05/29/186439399/natural-gas-export-plan-unites-oregon-landowners-against-it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Cove_Energy_Project
http://www.npr.org/2013/05/17/184700638/first-u-s-company-to-enter-export-market-for-natural-gas
http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/09/markets/china-banks-us-expansion/index.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/eyeonasia/archives/2009/10/gms_iconic_humm.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/29/us-shuanghui-idUSBRE94S0K920130529
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0529/Chinese-buy-Smithfield-Foods-Shuanghui-to-pay-4.7B-for-US-meat-producer

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"The truth, the political truth, and nothing but the political truth.
A journalist has no better friend than the truth."
- Scott Rohter

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